For all the recent concern over teen bullying, large numbers of adults also deal with peer-to-peer intimidation,
especially at work: Approximately one in four U.S. workers say they’ve been
bullied on the job, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute.

Now comes word that the targets of
workplace torment aren’t the only casualties of the phenomenon: A new study by
Canadian researchers, published in the most recent issue of the journal Human
Relations, suggests that co-workers who witness bullying are also traumatized
by the phenomenon—and are as likely as victims themselves to look for a new
job.

To understand the full effects of
workplace bullying, researchers from the University of British Columbia’s
Sauder School of Business went to a hotbed of the practice: the hospital floor.
(While more than 60% of on-the-job bullies are men, according to the WBI,
previous research has shown that nurses are especially prone to the practice.)
Surveying several hundred nurses from several dozen units of a large Canadian
health provider, the researchers determined which units and nurses were
experiencing bullying as a significant problem.

Meanwhile, they asked all the survey
participants, regardless of their bullying experience, to assess their
intentions to leave their jobs. (Intentions to quit have been shown to match up
strongly with employees actually leaving jobs.)

The noise of the open office is one of
employees’ chief complaints about it, and research shows that the ceaseless
hubbub can actually undermine our motivation.

In a study published in the Journal of
Applied Psychology, 40 female clerical workers were subjected to three hours of
“low-intensity noise” designed to simulate the sounds heard in a typical open
office. A control group experienced three hours of blessed quiet. Afterward,
both groups were given puzzles to solve; unbeknownst to them, the puzzles had
no solution. The participants who’d been treated to a quiet work setting kept
plugging away at the puzzles, while the subjects who’d endured the noisy
conditions gave up after fewer attempts.

Look around any open-plan office today
(especially one full of younger employees) and you’ll see that many workers
deal with this problem by wearing ear buds or headphones. Although it might
seem that importing one’s own noise wouldn’t be much of a solution — and
although we don’t yet have research evidence on the use of private music in the
office — experts say that this approach could be effective on at least one
dimension. Part of the reason office noise reduces our motivation is that it’s
a factor out of our control, so the act of asserting control over our aural
environment may lead us to try harder at our jobs.

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